Daily Archives: May 17, 2010

California Catholic Daily: “Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, the political action arm of the state’s nine Planned Parenthood affiliates, wasted no time in gearing up its PR machine against anticipated budget cuts proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to keep the state from falling into a financial abyss that could end in bankruptcy within months.”

Stanley Fish writing in the New York Times | Opinionator: “The Social Justice Education Project means what its title says: students are to be brought to see what the prevailing orthodoxy labors to occlude so that they can join the effort to topple it. To this end the Department of Mexican American Studies (I quote again from its Web site) pledges to ‘work toward the invoking of a critical consciousness within each and every student’ and ‘promote and advocate for social and educational transformation.’ . . . [AZ House Bill 2281, however] tendentiously, and without support either of argument or evidence, affirms a relationship between critically questioning the ideology of individual rights — and make no mistake, it is an ideology — and the production of racism and hatred.”

10 Connects: “Ybor Square, which houses the Spaghetti Warehouse and Creative Loafing newspaper, is owned by the Church of Scientology. As a religious building, the church will be exempt from paying almost $75,000 in property taxes . . . Pardo [head of the Ybor Community Development District] says he is also worried about the Scientologists taking up the limited parking spaces in the district. But the biggest question is how the Scientologists got approval from the city and zoning administrator Catherine Coyle, because places of religious assembly are prohibited in that part of Ybor City.”

LifeSiteNews: “The president of Canada’s public broadcaster told the Senate finance committee that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), which has gained a firm reputation in Canada for its heavy liberal slant, has commissioned a study on itself to determine whether its news is biased.”

Selma Times-Journal: “‘Ms. Kagan’s lack of judicial experience and short time as solicitor general, arguing just six cases before the court is troubling,’ Sessions said in the statement. ‘The public expects Supreme Court nominees to possess a mastery of the …

BBC: “A heterosexual Austrian couple have embarked on a court battle to have their relationship legally recognised as a ‘registered partnership’ – a new form of civil union for same-sex couples. Helga Ratzenboeck and Martin Seydl say they don’t want a traditional marriage and insist that the law should be blind to gender and sexuality.”

Robert F. Nagel writes at National Review: “We shouldn’t rely on the Supreme Court to enforce the Constitution . . . In 2005, the Supreme Court determined that the government’s condemnation of a perfectly respectable private home for purposes of a sale to a private developer was for a ‘public use’ and, therefore, constitutional. This decision was widely derided as an abdication of judicial responsibility. But in just the next two years, legislatures in 42 states reformed their laws to protect against such outrages. This kind of vigorous political action is a model for how conservatives should defend constitutional values.”

Palm Beach Post: “Democratic state Sen. and attorney general candidate Dave Aronberg called Florida’s statutory ban on adoptions by gays and lesbians ‘immoral’ and said he would not defend the law if he were Florida’s AG.”

ADF Attorney Travis Barham writing at speakupmovement.org/university: “Last week, the Alliance Defense Fund Center for Academic Freedom complimented Mohave Community College—both on this blog and in a press release—for continuing to allow prayers at the pinning ceremony for its nursing program. MCC had eliminated the prayers but then opted to allow them to continue after receiving a letter from ADF. Yet in Inside Higher Ed today, President Michael Kearns claims MCC never eliminated prayers from the ceremony and that ADF exaggerated the impact of its letter. While Inside Higher Ed has always been among the most reputable and professional sources for news on higher education issues, we wish that they would have contacted us before running their story on this case. But as Paul Harvey would say, it is now time for ‘the rest of the story,’ the part that President Kearns left out of his remarks.”

News-Record: “You might have been thinking that Greensboro City Council members need some divine intervention to help them run the city right. Mayor Bill Knight went a step further. He’s bringing prayer to the group’s regular meetings. At Knight’s discretion, the moment of silence at the beginning of the City Council meetings will be replaced by an invocation . . .”

Reuters: “HIV prevalence among gay and bisexual men has hit alarming levels in Asia and most of them do not have access to services and care due to punitive laws which drive them underground, a U.N.-backed report said on Monday . . . ”

Christianity Today: “Pakistan-born Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, patron of Release, said: ‘The blasphemy law needs repealing, but it is a symptom of a much wider drive to enforce Islamic orthodoxy. It’s not just Christians, but Muslims themselves who suffer as a result of Islamic law – especially the women.’”

CNSNews: “Americans in the 18 to 29 age bracket are now more likely than their elders to believe abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, according to the data released last week, and generally oppose abortion in greater numbers than Baby Boomers . . . ”

Catholic Culture: “The Most Rev. Thomas J. Olmsted, Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix, released the following statement today in response to the acknowledgement by officials at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center to the media that an unborn child was killed several months ago at St. Joseph’s through a direct abortion: ’I am gravely concerned by the fact that an abortion was performed several months ago in a Catholic hospital in this Diocese. I am further concerned by the hospital’s statement that the termination of a human life was necessary to treat the mother’s underlying medical condition . . . ‘”

EU Observer: “A fresh survey by the International Lesbian and Gay Association has said that the predominantly Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian countries of eastern Europe have the worst track record on gay rights. Ukraine and Russia scored the lowest on the ILGA index, closely followed by Belarus, Moldova and Turkey. In the EU, Cyprus, Latvia and Poland are the least progressive. Belarus police on Saturday (15 May) cemented the country’s reputation by violently breaking-up a small, 20-person-strong Slavic Pride march.”

Tennessean.com: “Abortion opponents fought passage of President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul to the bitter end, and now that it’s the law, they’re using it to limit coverage by private insurers.”

NY Daily News: “After 17 years of registering domestic partners, the city will soon offer marriage-like ceremonies when they run off to City Hall to get hitched, just like straight couples have had for generations.”

Ottawa Citizen: “The criminal case against an Ottawa man has cast light on potentially unsafe sexual practices by some people in the gay community. Steven Paul Boone, 29, was charged earlier this month with nine counts of aggravated sexual assault for knowingly failing to disclose his HIV-positive status to another Ottawa man, now 18, who contracted the disease after the two had unprotected sex several times in January and February.”

Brandon Sun: “A firestorm of virulent reaction has engulfed the Roman Catholic Primate of Canada, who is being pilloried for describing abortion as a moral crime even when it’s performed on rape victims . . . ”

ADF Attorney Greg Baylor writing at speakupmovement.org/university: “In its Supreme Court brief, Hastings remarkably argued that it needed to punish CLS in order to protect its own reputation. It was intolerable to Hastings for others to think that it tolerated the allegedly intolerant. It is reasonable to infer that Hastings was simply embarrassed that its student body included those who held religious and moral beliefs it deemed retrograde. Hastings was unmoved by the fact that so many other public universities had accommodated the associational freedom of their religious student groups. Indeed, there was sometimes a whiff of ‘we’re going to be the ones who won’t back down to the evil Religious Right.’ In short, image was everything. At schools like Hastings, if ‘image’ gets in a fight with the Constitution, the Constitution sadly loses.

Guardian: “The Church of England says it fears that the BBC is in danger of ‘losing sight of its essence – the DNA that makes it an enduring part of national culture’, and that religious broadcasting will suffer as a result. Amid concerns about and increased competition among digital channels, the Church insists that faith matters must form a central part of the BBC’s ‘critical role as a guarantor of public space’.”

David Bernstein writes at the Volokh Conpsiracy: “. . . even at the most elite law schools (and unlike at elite private undergrads, where ‘exciting’ applicants do get a significant leg up), admission for 80+% of students is primarily, in most cases almost exclusively, based on LSATs and GPAs . . . ”

PR-USA.net: “Today, Liberty Institute announced the launch of StopRewritingHistory.com, a site that offers concerned citizens the chance to sign a petition of support for the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE), encouraging the elected body to keep the social studies standards, to stand strong against liberal attempts to distort the truth, and to not to delay the vote scheduled for Friday, May 21, 2010.”

Carol Platt Liebau writes at Townhall: “So what explains the fact that only now are Republicans starting to oppose Democrat nominees with the same political vigor that’s long characterized the Democrats’ response to Republican presidents? Part of it may be because Republicans have finally realized that if all their presidents’ nominees are labeled as ‘extremists’ and dragged through the mud – yet they themselves continue to tip their hats and nod politely to left-of-center nominees – the result will be a definition of ‘mainstream’ jurisprudence that falls ever farther to the left on the political continuum. But there’s more to it than that . . . ”

AP: “Kagan isn’t revealing much as she plods through a painstaking series of Capitol Hill meetings with the senators whose backing she needs for confirmation. But the 50-year-old solicitor general – who’s never been a judge – has weighed in cautiously on several issues as she strives to paint a fuller picture of what kind of a justice she might be . . . ”

CTV: “The top echelons of power in Ottawa have come under the influence of a growing right-wing religious movement, according to a controversial new book. ‘The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada,’ was released this week. In it, journalist Marci McDonald writes that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is catering to Christian conservative groups in an effort to bolster his party’s political base.”

Religion Clause Blog: “The Arizona Republic reports that Gov. Jan Brewer on Wednesday signed House Bill 2596 that gives added protections from land use regulations to religious institutions. It prohibits zoning regulations that impose an unreasonable burden on the exercise of religion, even if the government has a compelling interest . . . ”

Religion Clause Blog: “The Obama administration has so far not announced an official position on whether it would continue the Bush Administration policy that allowed social-service groups receiving federal faith-based funding to apply religious criteria in hiring . . . ”

FOX News: “After much pressure from within the Wikipedia community, co-founder Jimmy Wales has relinquished his top-level control over the encyclopedia’s content, as well as all of its parent company’s projects . . . According to insider sources and publicly available internal listserve discussions, Wikimedia editors have rebelled in the last week against Wales’ attempts to remove pornographic images from the nonprofit’s websites.” | Related: Wikimedia dumps porn following FoxNews probe

B-92: “President of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek has condemned homophobia as International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO) is marked today. ‘The European Union is devoted to combating discrimination on any ground: homophobia is no exception. This commitment is enshrined in our fundamental legal texts: both in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU and in the Treaty of the European Union,’ Buzek said.”

Interfax: “Representatives of sexual minorities in Minsk were prevented by police from holding an unauthorized rally, head of the GayRussia human rights project and co-organizer of the 2010 Slavic Gay Pride Parade Nikolay Alexeyev told Interfax on Saturday.”

Chester E. Finn Jr. writing at National Review Online: “Are we in the early stages of outsourcing our education system to the same country to which we’ve surrendered our manufacturing sector and entrusted our national debt? That’s probably too dire, at least for now, but the Chinese education ministry has been extending its tentacles worldwide, from the 550 higher-ed programs (‘Confucius Institutes’) already operating in 90 countries (including almost 70 on American shores) to the newer but no less worrisome K–12 language programs that are taking the U.S. by storm. One of Beijing’s chief U.S. partners in this venture, the Asia Society, has already opened 20 pilot sites in American public schools and seeks to launch 80 more by fall 2011. Some districts and states — notably North Carolina — are working directly with the Chinese government, while still more districts are turning to their local-university-based Confucius Institutes to get started.”

Joel Kotkin writing at NewGeography.com: “Europe’s problems extend well beyond policy, into the realm of culture and demographics. Even in France, people and what they do actually matter more than abstract ideas. A culture that believes in itself, not only to have children, but also start businesses and innovate will overcome one, however theoretically well managed, that does not. This is the fundamental problem of Europe as whole, although it does not apply equally to every individual country in the union.”

Catholic Online: “On Pentecost Sunday, May 23, 2010, members of a Homosexual Equivalency Activist Movement which calls itself the ‘Rainbow Sash’ have announced their plans to attempt to disrupt the celebration of the Holy Mass throughout the Nation.They have specifically announced their intention to openly confront one of the great Churchmen of the United States, the Archbishop of Chicago and President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Francis Cardinal George, OMI.”

AP: “Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Senate’s Republican whip, said Sunday that he doesn’t see the GOP employing a filibuster against Kagan, who was nominated for the high court by President Barack Obama . . . ”

Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, writing in the Washington Post: “The gatekeeper power of such institutions is why it was so important to desegregate them (using affirmative action, among other tools) and why virtually all leaders of great universities talk about diversity and access. For about 40 years now, all the top law schools have tried to pick students who are not just brilliant but who have the potential to be outstanding leaders from and for all of America’s communities. Today, “elite” doesn’t carry the old-boy, classist, midcentury sense. In fact, law schools strive for an elitism that is quite democratic in comparison with many other fields. As at Yale and Harvard, we at Berkeley seek to build a campus community that is as exciting and diverse as our nation.”

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway writing at Christianity Today: “To be sure, some advocates of same-sex marriage hope that heterosexual marital norms of monogamy and fidelity would be transferred to same-sex unions. But since these norms are based on the ideal that marriage is the union of a man and woman making a permanent and exclusive commitment for the purpose of bearing and rearing children, it would be irrational to expect same-sex partners—whose sexual relations bear no risk of procreation—to share the same norms.”

Mary Eberstadt writing in the June/July 2010 issue of First Things: “[W]hile we’re on the subject of bad habits that can turn unwitting kids into unhappy adults, how about that other epidemic out there that is far more likely to make their future lives miserable than carrying those extra pounds ever will? That would be the emerging social phenomenon of what can appropriately be called ‘sexual obesity’: the widespread gorging on pornographic imagery that is also deleterious and unhealthy, though far less remarked on than that other epidemic—and nowhere near an object of universal public concern.”

Business Week: “Almost half of these deaths occurred in just five countries — China, Nigeria, India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Pakistan. Africa (4.2 million) and Southeast Asia (2.39 million) accounted for the highest numbers of deaths . . . “

“Couples will stop having sex to conceive babies within a decade and use IVF instead, scientists said yesterday. They say 30-somethings will increasingly rely on artificial methods of fertilisation because natural human reproduction is ‘fairly inefficient’ . . . ”

Human Events: “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently called on the Catholic Church to speak out from the pulpit to promote immigration reform, reversing herself on whether the church should take political stands . . . ‘Politicians usually send mixed messages to pastors about what they can and can’t do,’ [Erik Stanley] said. ‘When it’s convenient, they tell pastors that you should speak out in favor of a particular proposal or politician, but then when the pastor does, the IRS comes knocking on the door.’”

MercatorNet | Sheila Reports: Here are just two things that have emerged in the past few days [about the health care bill]. They deserve attention. First, the Washington Post raised the issue of physician conscience protection or lack thereof . . . ‘”Any government power over health care can be exercised in a way that discriminates against pro-life health providers, [said Matt Bowman,] especially when officials already support abortion and oppose enforcement of conscience laws.”‘”

The AP carries this article arguing that sexual preferences are irrelevant when it comes to the Supreme Court nominee. Meanwhile, AP headlines, are clogged with “gay” this and “gay” that . . . Very strange for an irrelevant topic . . .

Dakota Voice: “[The Rapid City Journal reports] South Dakota gubernatorial candidate Gordon Howie urges pastors to endorse candidates despite a 1954 tax code provision which prohibits this for tax exempt organizations . . . Two years ago, the Alliance Defense Fund began an initiative to overturn this unconstitutional 1954 interference with the First Amendment freedoms of religious and speech liberty enjoyed by pastors and churches.”

USA Today: “A school district that gained the support of President Barack Obama for promoting accountability after it fired all its teachers from a struggling school announced Sunday it reached an agreement with the union to return all the current staffers to their jobs . . . ”

Wall Street Journal full report via Google: “The promise of charter schools is that they’ll improve student performance in return for exemptions from the staffing, curriculum and budget requirements of traditional public schools. The reality is often very different. According to a new study from the Fordham Institute, too many charter schools lack the operational autonomy they need to be effective . . . ”

Yahoo News (AP): “People want Democrats to control Congress after this fall’s elections, a shift from April, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll released Saturday. But the margin is thin and there’s a flashing yellow light for incumbents of both parties: Only about one-third want their own lawmakers re-elected.”

Kerry Picket writes at the Washington Times: “. . . the California Penal Code actually requires that every law enforcement agency in the state shall ‘fully cooperate with the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service regarding any person who is arrested if he or she is suspected of being present in the United States in violation of federal immigration laws.’ Below is a copy of section 834b of the California Penal Code that deals with immigration law enforcement at the local level.”

NY Times: “In her early years as a law professor, Elena Kagan wrote almost exclusively on the First Amendment. There are indications in those writings that her views on government regulation of speech were closer to the Supreme Court’s more conservative justices, like Antonin Scalia, than to Justice John Paul Stevens, whom she hopes to replace . . . ”